Slow Lane

I drive my old car at 50 m.p.h. in the right-hand lane of the freeway. Faster drivers honk, tailgate, flash lights, yell, make finger gestures, and even try to pass on the right-hand side. Now I do own another car in Michigan. It will do 105 in second gear and has a calculated top speed of 146 m.p.h. So I am not impressed with the antics of these drivers. I have my stereo, A/C and emission controls, am safe, legal and quite comfortable. If they don't like it, why don't they just leave me alone, take one of the three lanes on my left and pass me?

Re "405 stuck in slow lane," April 25 The Times was kind enough to print a letter I wrote nearly six years ago, on June 23, 2007, on the 405 Freeway widening project. I will take the opportunity to say "I told you so. " To recap, I wrote: "Everybody will lose with this freeway expansion, because 10 minutes after it opens, the 405 Freeway will look exactly like it does today, only wider. "People will have suffered through the construction mess, traffic congestion and inconvenience, some losing their homes, all to give Caltrans more to do and a bunch of contractors cost overruns that we will be paying for as we sit in the bumper-to-bumper traffic a week after the expanded carpool lane opens.

Re Paul B. Beck's letter "Travel by Staying in Proper Lane": Yes, but one thing can be guaranteed: Go slow in right lane (58 to 59 m.p.h.), and within two minutes in your rear-view mirror, you'll see the radiator grill of a Gargantuan truck following three feet behind and two miles faster! JO INSLEE Irvine

Elon Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne. "The 405 … varies from bad to horrendous," said Musk, who also co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors. "It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this. … I don't know why they aren't marching in the streets. " The massive project to widen the 405 Freeway is not only causing traffic nightmares for motorists like Musk but has also been plagued by cost overruns and delays.

The Century Freeway, a mammoth $2.5-billion project, is half-finished. Construction of the traffic lanes is on schedule, as Times staff writers William Trombley and Ray Hebert report. The ambitious replacement housing program and the admirable affirmative-action goals are not. Therein lie some lessons. When completed, the well-designed and expensive freeway will stretch east and west between Norwalk and a point near Los Angeles International Airport.

Mississippi slowed the tempo and free-wheeling Florida simply couldn't handle it. The Rebels gave their NCAA tournament hopes a big boost by dominating the No. 6-ranked Gators in a 68-51 victory Saturday at Oxford, Miss. Mississippi, 19-7 overall and 8-5 in the Southeastern Conference, held Florida--averaging 84.4 points a game--to its lowest point total in six seasons under Coach Billy Donovan. "We know we're not going to get into a race with them," Mississippi guard David Sanders said.

Re "Revival of Carpool Lane Bill Promised," Sept. 10 The failure of legislators to get the I-405 carpool lane is a great example of why we're on the decline. It's September, and state legislators won't go back to work until January? The bill was held up because of a combination of political bickering and, let me get this straight, union opposition to a process that would "reduce the state agency's role" and "speed them [projects] up." I guess it makes sense; the Legislature needs a four-month break before it can work again, and it has to find a way to make state projects slower and increase the bureaucratic role in getting anything done.

Over the last two months I have come to see a new New York -- and I'm not referring to the latest gentrified neighborhood. This is not just a place but a mental construct that reflects the strength and frailty of those who envision it. And so when I was ailing recently, the city was redrawn in my mind, just the way it was when I had my heart broken and a certain bench in Central Park became a reminder of a bad breakup.

Dear Street Smart: I am a trailer-boat owner who still thinks that the far right lane on the freeway is the lane for us. The exception is when we move over one lane to the left in order to pass a slower vehicle. Why do I see vehicles pulling boats, travel trailers and utility trailers in the fast lanes, closest to the center divider? And why don't they ever seem to get a ticket? Isn't it still the law that vehicles towing another vehicle must be in the far right lanes?

With the holidays past and the ink on the resolutions still drying, resolve lingers in the air. But as the impulse for more/faster/better stirs in the nascent days of 2005, Canadian journalist Carl Honore wants to show life in the slow lane to the overworked and the overstressed.

Had enough of life in the fast lane and looking to take it down a notch or two? You might seek guidance from a colony of deep-sea microbes harvested from the barren depths of the Pacific Ocean that are progressing so slowly, they almost appear to be dead. Just how plodding are these ancient creatures, who are buried about 100 feet deep in the seabed? Some of them haven't received any new food for 86 million years, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth. And they are using up oxygen at rates 10,000 times slower than their counterparts on the surface of the ocean floor.

At least for a time, Los Angeles and Orange counties were not the kings of traffic congestion. A new study shows that motorists in the greater Los Angeles area in 2009 experienced fewer delays from traffic congestion than other parts of the country ? a change in reputation that could be short-lived as the region recovers from the worst recession since World War II. Released Thursday, the latest annual Urban Mobility Report from the Texas Transportation Institute states that Chicago and Washington, D.C., surpassed the Los Angeles area in the amount of time that individual motorists were stuck in traffic during peak travel periods.

El Churrero -- the Churro Man -- sidesteps tamale carts, squeezes between bumpers and beggars, working 24 lanes of idling vehicles. He walks through shimmering exhaust clouds, hawking sombreros teetering atop his head and sweets held aloft in a blue basket. His churros are warm and moist. "Churros here," he yells. "If they're not hot, you don't pay." Deciderio Mauricio Cantera first waded into the sea of traffic at the gateway to California in 1968 and set eyes on the bored and the hungry as they waited, fidgeted and honked, inching toward the San Ysidro Port of Entry.

"Management" is a mellow slow dance of a romantic comedy that skips the "meet-cute" in favor of "awkward encounter" -- a bottle of bad wine and a modest motel room where absolutely nothing sexy or romantic happens, which turns out to be strangely appealing.

If you've read any article about newspapers or magazines recently, they likely were stuffed with predictions of doom. Search the phrase "death of print" in Google and you'll come up with almost a million results. But even in this gloomy landscape, there are bright spots, perhaps none more unlikely than Westways magazine, which is growing as it turns 100 years old this month. Hip? Nope, and it has no pretenses to be so.

The federal government's latest annual report on the availability of high-speed Internet service throughout the country contains 19 pages of detailed data -- pie charts, bar graphs, maps and column upon column of numbers and percentages. Most of them are useless. The Federal Communications Commission considers any Internet connection faster than 200 kilobits per second to be high speed, even though that's too slow to effectively watch streaming video and download large files.

The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them. What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach.